Shoes are merchandised in stores in two principal modes. One traditional approach is to have a display area containing a sample of each different type of shoe available for sale. The customer advises a sales clerk as to the style and size that is desired, which the clerk then returns from a storeroom which is unaccessible to customers, and gives it to the customer to try on for fit, etc. Often, the customer will be frustrated to discover that the size for a desired style is not available, requiring the customer to make a further search for another style that may or may not be available in the desired size. Such practice is generally inefficient when there are a large number of customers desiring to be served. Furthermore, customers may prefer to browse available styles at their leisure without the assistance of a sales clerk.
A second shoe merchandising approach, requiring no sales clerk assistance, involves providing one or more stacks of boxed shoes of a given style on the floor or a low shelf, with the top box of at least one stack open to display the style of shoes in the boxes in the stacks. The stacks for the different styles being offered are typically located side-by-side in long rows, or aisles. As a consequence, customers can select their size in a particular style without need for a sales clerk. While this “self service” approach has many advantages, there are also some problems. For example, the open box containing the “display” pair of shoes may be inadvertently shifted to a stack of shoes different than that contained in the open box. As a consequence, customers encounter difficulty locating boxes containing the “displayed shoes,” rendering it more difficult to find the “displayed shoe” in their size.
Another problem is that existing schemes for storing and displaying shoes in self-service footwear stores do not readily and conveniently accommodate, on a space-efficient basis, situations where the inventory of different styles varies from style to style at any given time, and/or the inventories of the different styles vary from style to style to different extents over a period of time. Stated differently, prior self-service shoe display and storage systems are not readily reconfigurable or adaptable to account for varying quantities of boxes in each size, such as when initial inventories of different styles vary and/or the different styles sell at different rates.
There is thus a need for a footwear display and storage system which permits retailers to provide substantially all of their stock on display in a showroom in an organized fashion, which permits customers to peruse various footwear styles, to quickly and easily ascertain if a particular size is available in a desired style, and which efficiently and conveniently enables the stacks of the different shoe styles to be rearranged as inventories of the different styles change over time and/or initial inventories of the different styles differ at the outset.